Viable is a broad term.

I use a single provider and multiple indexers, and it is an objectively better experience when compared to torrents. Very fast downloads and I almost always find what I am looking for. For old or esoteric stuff, I rely on Internet Archive or YouTube.

I do hit an infrequent failed attempt but that is due to me relying on a single provider/backbone.

Long and short, usenet is viable and convenient for me than torrents and paid streaming and gaming subscriptions.

I have tried past Haiku betas on an old-but-no-so-old ThinkPad X31, and the experience wasn’t buggy enough to go back NetBSD.

I really liked the conclusion of the article. As someone who uses NetBSD as my primary computer, an old Nokia with Symbian as my secondary phone, self-host whatever I can, and with a general aversion to Electron apps, the conclusion really resonated with me.

We like to imagine a world of Haiku clients, talking to NetBSD back-end servers, and nothing but feature-phones – maybe running a revived Symbian. No AI, no Electron apps anywhere. A sky as clear and blue as the Haiku desktop, with no trace of a Cloud to be seen. That sounds idyllic to us. If it does to you as well, we think you might enjoy trying Haiku.

I predominantly use Usenet for procuring all my media, except for

1. Switch ROMs, which I rely on torrents via NSWTL. I have 4 indexers and all of them give me “missing parts” error when I try to download Switch ROMs.
2. Music, which I rely on Telegram bots. I am in the process of migrating my streaming library to Navidrome and I haven’t found a better workflow than to send a playlist link to the bot, and downloading the music and then tagging it using Picard.

Sure. It is called deezload2bot. Found it on fmhy.net.

Edited to remove direct link.

Searching for Stash on DDG reveals that the name is shared by at least a finance manager, network tool, and a porn clip organiser (the very last item on the first page of results).

I am safely assuming you are referring to the third one.

TIL.

On Haiku? I haven’t tried it.

I get this error regardless of the network or device I am accessing from. The same goes for when accessing cd-romance.

AI Pioneer 🤖

• Fleet: 1 device · 11–20 TB
• Motivation: Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Privacy & data ownership, Fun / the hobby itself
• My MVPs: Plex, Radarr, Immich, RomM, BookOrbit

I agree. Haiku is a great option if one wants to give their old computer a new lease of life.

However, anyone trying it out must be aware that it is still in beta, and the OS does behave as such. Performance takes a hit at times. It is not at all optimised for battery usage. Suspend/resume do not work (and as per the developers, it is not a priority). I could go on.

Having said that, it is a distinct piece of software as well as philosophy, which one must definitely try out at least once.

Also, none of the newer OSes (besides NetBSD, Puppy Linux derivatives, and maybe Antix Linux) even support the computers that this OS targets. :-)

Cloudflare’s dashboard is one of the biggest offenders, if not the biggest.

I don’t have one yet, but I do plan to get one as I infrequently get those errors with movies too.

I am using NewsHosting as my primary/sole provider (the bundled Privado VPN is what I bound qBitTorrent with), which is on Omicron.

Will look for a fallback on a different backbone. Though any inputs on this will be appreciated. :-)

I started out with Jellyfin. However, when it came to opening up the media server to friends and family, I had to roll up an instance of Plex (and eventually bought their pass).

Plex simply requires less fiddling to get things to acceptable state, especially for users outside your home network. Their guides are very straightforward.

Moreover, the apps are more polished and reliable, especially for TV platforms. Fortunately, some third party polished apps like Infuse and Plezy also support Jellyfin should you choose to switch servers later (I know that I do).

Though the reason Plex is convenient, is also its most ickiest part. I hate that Plex owns the middle layer which handles authentication and other orchestration. That same piece of infrastructure can also bring down your media server if it goes down (though it can be partially mitigated by disabling authentication for devices on LAN so that devices on your home network can still access your media).

I eventually plan to move everyone to Jellyfin, but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon as the apps are not there yet, and I will also have to redo parts of my infrastructure.